There are a number of entries in this dictionary that look as if the author got up to fill his coffee cup and then, upon returning to his keyboard his keyboard, accidentally retyped the words he last completed. These words include couscous, jubjub, wow-wow, gite-gite, piri-piri, pili-pili, mealie-mealie, and bonbon. Such words, all of them names of foods, demonstrate a linguistic anomaly called reduplication, the repetition of a syllable in a word. In the case of couscous (a dish made from pounded wheat), the Arabic word from which it derives, kouskous, is itself reduplicated, as is the older Arabic word from which kouskous in turn developed: kaskasa, meaning to pound; the word kaskasa, with its repeated kas syllable, may have been formed in imitation of the sound made by pounding a mallet or pestle up and down. Couscous first appeared in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Piri-piri, the name of a sauce made from red peppers, first appeared in English in 1964, and also derives from a source that is itself reduplicated: pili-pili, the name of a very hot African pepper. In turn, pili-pili is a corruption of the Arabic word felfel, meaning strong pepper. The source of this Arabic word is unknown, but certainly felfel is similar to the sound you make after you bite into a too-hot pepper. Other reduplicated food words have been formed not from a previous source but out of thin air. Wow-wow, for example, was invented in the early nineteenth century as a self-consciously silly name for a stewed-beef sauce; later in that century Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland and the poem Jabberwocky, invented jubjub as the name of a chimerical, ferocious, and delicious bird. Reduplicated words may also develop from children’s tendency to repeat sounds: mama, dada, and pee pee are reduplications, as is bonbon, the French name for sugar candy that literally means good-good. Bonbon was first used in English at the end of the eighteenth century. Gite-gite is also French in origin but does not derive from the jabbering of children. In French, gite-gite refers to the fleshy part of an ox’s shin used in ragouts; it derives from the verb gesir, meaning to lie down, because it is this part of the animal’s shin that touches the ground when it beds down for the night. Why this part of the ox became known as gite-gite and not simply gite is a bit of a mystery. My own suggestion is that the doubling of gite results from an ox having two pairs of shins, front and back. Finally, quasi-reduplications include knick-knack and pish-pash. Knick-knack appeared in the late seventeenth century as a name for trinkets but also for any light, dainty article of food; a hundred years later, knick-knack also came to mean a meal to which every guest brought a dish. In origin, knickknack is simply a playful variation of the older knack, a word that meant a trick. Similarly, pish-pash—the name of a rice-soup fed to British babies in India in the nineteenth century—is likely an extension of the older pish, a word used since the sixteenth century to express contempt for a trivial matter.
Ground grains or meals that have been coarsely processed, like millet, can be prepared by steaming them in a small amount of liquid. These dishes are commonly served with various African or Near Eastern cuisines. Additionally, a type of couscous known as el mistouf can be prepared by adding sweeteners.
Couscous is a culinary specialty that originated in North Africa. It is typically made by cooking millet flour or fine semolina made from wheat germ in water until it becomes fluffy. Couscous is often served with mutton stew or other meat-based dishes.